How do you improve your prototypes with user feedback?

In refining prototypes, the genre of your game dictates the approach. For example: - For a hypercasual title, create a mock-up creative and do minor UA to observe initial engagement. - For an indie hack-and-slash game, host a live playtest to observe player interactions. Across genres, the principle remains: assemble a varied group of testers, and their collective feedback is your compass. Look for patterns, not anomalies, as they're the landmarks of refinement. Dive more profoundly than the apparent to find the root causes of stumbled experiences. It's an iterative dance of observation, adaptation, and evolution, steering your prototype from a rough sketch to a fantastic game that smoothly flows in your player's favor.

Defining the goal of the test is super important because the goal does also change the testers that you might need. For example you want to collect real user experiences you need playtesters that never saw your game, that are not payed by you, and they are as close as possible to your TA. You want to see if your prototype is good enough to be sent to publishers ? You need experts, that can tell you where to focus your resources to maximize your work.

I recommend 2 basic methods for collecting feedback: - Playtesting: watching potential players playing your game and - Data: retention, engagement (later monetization) - understanding how your players use the game

Each defined goal requires a different method. You also need to consider the sources you have at your disposal. It is not always feasible to do the in-house playtesting with 20 players. Examples: 1. Do you need to test out the usability of your newly proposed feature? You can do guerilla testing with the low-fidelty black and white prototype designed in Figma. 2. Do you need to test out your newly designed tutorial? You can opt in for the playtesting. 3. Do you need to learn more about your high level players? There might be a problem to source these players in order to execute the playtesting session. In this case you might consider User Interviews or Diary Studies

In general the more methodologies you use the better, however each method can cost money and time, so this brute force approach can be problematic. Based on your goal understand l, what you want to do with this data, for example if you need to make quick and small changes watching someone play can be instantaneous and cheap, but your memory will fade so you need to act quickly. Collecting data, requires specific code to that, and someone or a team that will analyze those data to get insights, this is a long process but will produce long term results. Surveys and interviews can produce more digestible data, but they can produce false positives

Paper prototypes Roleplay prototypes Trailer prototypes Are all cheap and quick way to test specific elements of your design without involve the entire team

The cheapest way to test is testing just the idea. Create a video of your future gameplay and start running User Acquisition - you will see vast differences in KPIs (click rate, virality...) between multiple ideas. This way you can develop only ideas that have a higher potential for success.